Posted By Faye
The word innovation appears frequently in advertisements, positioning statements, branding, marketing, mission statements and is used by most businesses and organizations in some fashion or form. But the question is how many businesses and organizations really make innovation a top priority? And how many businesses and organizations are truly good at innovation? One recent AMA/HRI study found that although most organizations say that innovation is a top priority, few companies are actually good at it.
Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach wants to know whether you have been asked and tasked to innovate within your company or organization? And the follow-up question is are you having difficulty getting started and achieving results? I suspect that many readers of this article have experienced or witnessed that one of the biggest issues with innovation is that they really are not sure just where to start. So, with that in mind, Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach offers the following list of twenty (20) tips to inspire and initiate innovation for you and your business.
Innovation Tip #1: Develop a clearly defined and focused vision for innovation within your business.
Innovation Tip #2: Develop a set of measurable goals that will clearly define what you want and need to get out of innovation.
Innovation Tip #3: Develop a system for tracking and managing innovation.
Innovation Tip #4: Develop and implement a forum for sharing. Promote the open exchange of ideas and collaboration among your co-workers and team members. The forum could be face-to-face meetings or dong so online with message boards or blogs.
Innovation Tip #5: Engage the powerful technique of brainstorming. The power of brainstorming enables you to address a business challenge, issue or opportunity and is effective because it sets no boundaries and allows people to say whatever they want.
Innovation Tip #6: Consider establishing an Innovation Team whose priority is ensuring that innovation is a priority and that there is a clearly defined and focused effort to achieve innovation in your business.
Innovation Tip #7: Research what others, outside your organization, do to initiate & inspire innovation. Set a goal to identify 3 or 4 organizations that are very innovative and then request visits to those companies to gain new perspectives on innovation.?
Innovation Tip #8: Commit to personally doing something different from your ordinary routine. For example: try a new coffee house for your morning coffee; take a different route to work; try a new menu item; or anything that you would not typically do on a daily basis.
Innovation Tip #9: Find a business coach or mentor and learn something from them.
Innovation Tip #10: Develop a proactive approach to generating new ideas. Create a list of questions/challenges you can pose to your team. This will enable you to make innovation specific and proactive and consequently have it achieve more Top Of Mind Awareness (TOMA) and yield more strategically relevant ideas.?
Innovation Tip #11: Create some momentum for innovation in your business by selecting and committing to a project that will result in a “quick win” and will provide confirmation that innovation does produce positive results.
Innovation Tip #12: Create a sense of urgency by setting an aggressive timetable for a project.
Innovation Tip #13: Reward creativity and innovation in personal and creative ways. Develop rewards that will appeal personally to an individual’s interests and values.
Innovation Tip #14: Create and foster an environment that is fun and challenging. Creative people have tendencies toward being irreverent and like to have fun.
Innovation Tip #15: Break down individual isolation and create opportunities for people to bounce ideas off of each other. Encourage (or force if necessary), people out of their workstations and offices to meet in small groups to discuss challenges, issues, trends, opportunities and threats, etc.
Innovation Tip #16: Breakdown hierarchy and emphasize and reward creative and innovative ideas regardless of where they come from in your business.
Innovation Tip #17: Create an environment that will allow everyone to speak freely when working with his or her teams.
Innovation Tip #18: Aim for simplicity so that the innovative ideas are easy to understand, easy to explain to others and relatively easy to implement.
Innovation Tip #19: Focus on the action or the experience and use verbs rather than nouns (e.g. “teach people to think strategically” rather than “strategic thinking education”).
Innovation Tip #20: Adopt an attitude that you will view mistakes and failures as great learning opportunities and blessings in disguise.
Posted By Faye
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual – ARTHUR KOESTLER.
Often in life we ignore real creativity Innovation and creative thinking from the earliest memories of a child as we are commonly taught to ‘follow’ other children and then adults like tin soldiers into adulthood. Who ever taught you to think and listen within? Or that real creativity Innovation – does not come from outside of our being. In fact, we are born within of unlimited creativity and innovation if only we would learn the art of listening, believing and journeying within.
Some of the greatest architects, sculptors, artists, businessmen, businesswomen, doctors, celebrities male and female would never have effectively contributed to society had they never listened, journeyed and believed within. I believe we are living in a technological world where creative ideas and real creativity innovation is the principle ruling universal force.
By this I mean the Internet and modern day inventions is now allowing the world of people to design, write, create and innovate without limit. We cannot produce enough hours in the day to keep up or satisfy the demand’s of the world. Even now the world competes with each and every inhabitant mind against mind and innovation against innovation directly over the World Wide Web.
This is perhaps how thing’s always were and has now come “Full Circle” back to our origin within. No longer can education claim to have fashioned anything as we see in the new modern world of technology most things are being created out of spirit to spirit, passion and innate wisdom.
In Feb 2010, the BBC reported that Peter Horrocks the new director has ordered Journalists to use Social Media. He describes modern-day technology as: “This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary”, he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.” [Source: Guardian.Co.UK]
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU LISTENED TO YOU?
What most people do not realize and will struggle to make the shift of what was into what is now being the old industrial, manufacturing world into the new modern technological, services world. All this adds up to one thing you INNOVATE, CREATE OR FADE into oblivion. No, this does not necessarily mean you have to relocate, do a degree or heavily invest. It could just be that you start by listening within, meditating, take a sabbatical and get in touch with YOU for a change – within. YOU will be amazed of the limitless wisdom one carries within that is just waiting to instruct you how to be the next MySpace, YouTube or Facebook, now worth an estimated 1 billion USD.
Taking time out to listen to only you is the seat of not only universal wisdom, innovation and creation but your potential future. Technology now gives everyone around the world an even playing-field. Journalists have all been dethroned from what once was a specialist field has now become a global mom and pop field because everyone now can write, type and press send or submit. Of course, there is still novice and professional but with millions of people online you may receive as much if not more views or licks than most journalists.
The bottom line is fear not. Take the time to listen to your creative ideas, then innovate and create your world and passion and watch life uplift, bless and empower you beyond your wildest dreams online or offline.
Posted By Faye
How do you dream up new innovations? There are many ways. One of the most fun, though, is the modifying-word list. It all begins with the question, “What if it was…?”
You may have heard of this problem-solving, idea-generating technique before. The basic idea is to start with a particular problem or product and ask “What if it was bigger… smaller… cheaper… more expensive… less complicated… more complicated… more colorful?” and so on. The words are from a list that you work your way through for each problem or invention.
This is an easy way to come up with ideas for new innovations. Suppose you make refrigerators, for example, and need a new product. You ask “What if it was smaller?” A thermos-sized cooler operated by a small battery comes to mind. “What if it was cooler?” makes you think about the fact that the heat removed blows into the room, fighting against the air conditioning in the summer. Perhaps you could design a refrigerator that vents the hot air outside. Each word has the potential to give you a new idea.
What if you don’t have a specific problem or project in mind, though? What if you are just looking for a new innovation in any areas to work on, or you just like to invent things as a mental exercise? In that case, there is another way to use a modifying-word list, and it may be even more fun. Just start with the word instead of the thing or idea. Then apply the modifying word to everything you can think of.
For example, if you start with the word “easier,” you just look around at things and ask, “What if it was easier?”
Lights. It would be easier to turn them on in the dark if they were voice-activated.
Plants. Sell a line of plants that are almost impossible to kill, for those of us that can’t seem to keep house plants alive.
Democracy. Maybe a publishing company should make an interesting guidebook to democracy. Perhaps secure online voting would make it easier than going to the polls.
Brainpower. Three deep breaths always wakes up my brain. I bet it would work better if I had a small and easy to use oxygen dispenser.
To get in the habit of using this technique, you can either use the traditional technique – write down a few items and create innovations in your mind using the word list. Or you can try this other version – pick a modifier, like “more common,” and apply it to everything you see today, asking, “What if it was more common?” You never know what ideas and innovations will come to mind.
The New Innovations Word List
What if it was… easier… more difficult… larger… smaller… farther away… closer… sooner… later… softer… harder… poorer… richer… higher… lower… longer… shorter… certain… uncertain… newer… older… divided… combined… more common… less common… faster… slower… better… worse… cheaper… more expensive… hotter… colder… added to… subtracted from… unchanged… imaginary?
The list above is a basic one. You can start with that, but there are hundreds of idea-generating words you could add to it. Any adjectives, descriptive phrases, or words that can change your perspective can be potentially useful for stimulating ideas for new innovations.
Posted By Faye
How do you produce ideas for new innovations? Here is a great technique: Extract some basic ideas from existing products and inventions, and then apply them to new areas.
If you look at a thermostat, for example, you might think “A device to control the indoor climate.” This is certainly an idea that can be used to come up with something new. You have to look a little deeper, though, if you want more creative innovations. Continue with, “It measures the temperature and then, using that information, turns the heater on or off, to keep the house comfortable.”
Continuing even deeper, we see that it uses measurement in order to control something. Let’s work with that concept. With the technology that exists today, we can make things happen automatically, according to almost anything we can automatically measure. This is a powerful concept that can and will lead to some fantastic new innovations.
In an article on thought control, I pointed out that since we can measure the changing activity of the brain as we change the nature of our thoughts, we can already build a device that is operated just by our thoughts. Even with the technology of thirty years ago, we could have had a TV turn on whenever one’s pulse rate increased. If you then trained yourself to increase your pulse rate by thinking certain thoughts, you could turn on a television with your thoughts.
Other New Innovations
To have many such ideas and new innovations, just look around and start applying the basic concept of control by measurement. Looking at the television, and thinking of measurable things related to it, time is an obvious one. There are “sleep timers” that turn the TV off after a certain amount of time, but how about a device that only allows the TV to be on for three hours in any given day? Kids can watch when they want, but they won’t be able to watch too much.
A thermometer gives me the idea for a sign that changes it’s message according to the weather. A restaurant, for example, could have the sign say “Come in out of the cold,” when it was cold, or “Cool off with an ice cold drink,” when it was hot, and so on. I’m sure there are other businesses whose messages would be variously more or less effective according to the weather.
When I look at the traffic, I see that speed can be measured. There are already those radar signs now, that tell you how fast you are going. There could be a sign down the road that says “Slow down, we’re taking your picture,” or the radar gun could turn on a fake siren whenever someone goes ten miles per hour over the limit. The idea is simply that their speed triggers something that will hopefully slow them down.
Yesterday I saw a new invention that measures your girth. So what does it do with that information? Well, if you hold your stomach in, you get clear sound in your headphones. If you let your stomach hang out, the music is low quality and loses volume. While I’m not sure how well this stomach-exercise-motivator will sell, it does show how using the concept of measurement to control can lead to very different innovations. In fact, any application of a basic concept to new areas can lead to new innovations.